Swan Hunter, formerly known as Swan Hunter & Wigham Richardson, was one of the best known shipbuilding companies in the United Kingdom. Based in Wallsend, Tyne and Wear, the company was responsible for some of the greatest ships of the early 20th century — most famously, the RMS Mauretania which held the Blue Riband for the fastest crossing of the Atlantic, and the RMS Carpathia which rescued the survivors from the RMS Titanic.
http://picturesofswans.blogspot.com/
Monday 26 April 2010
Sunday 18 April 2010
Black Swan (Cygnus atratus)
The Black Swan (Cygnus atratus) is a large waterbird which breeds mainly in the southeast and southwest regions of Australia.
When swimming, black swans hold their necks arched or erect, and often carry their feathers or wings raised in an aggressive display. In flight, a wedge of black swans will form as a line or a V, with the individual birds flying strongly with undulating long necks, making whistling sounds with their wings and baying, bugling or trumpeting calls.
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When swimming, black swans hold their necks arched or erect, and often carry their feathers or wings raised in an aggressive display. In flight, a wedge of black swans will form as a line or a V, with the individual birds flying strongly with undulating long necks, making whistling sounds with their wings and baying, bugling or trumpeting calls.
luxury cars north wales
Wednesday 14 April 2010
greylag gosling tries unsuccessfully to catch butterfly
greylag gosling tries unsuccessfully to catch butterfly
Tuesday 13 April 2010
Abbotsbury Swannery
Abbotsbury Swannery is the only managed colony of nesting mute swans in the world. It is situated near the village of Abbotsbury in Dorset, England, 14 kilometres (9 mi) west of Weymouth on a 1-hectare (2-acre) site around the Fleet lagoon protected from the weather of Lyme Bay by Chesil Beach. The colony can number over 600 swans with around 150 pairs. Written records of the swannery’s existence go back to 1393 but it probably existed well before that.
http://picturesofswans.blogspot.com/
http://picturesofswans.blogspot.com/
Sunday 11 April 2010
mandible
The mandible (from Latin mandibula, "jawbone") or inferior maxillary bone forms the lower jaw and holds the lower teeth in place. It also refers to both the upper and lower sections of the beaks of birds; in this case the "lower mandible" corresponds to the mandible of humans while the "upper mandible" is functionally equivalent to the human maxilla but mainly consists of the premaxillary bones. Conversely, in bony fish for example, the mandible may be termed "lower maxilla".
pictures of swans
pictures of swans
anisodactyl
In birds with anisodactyl or heterodactyl feet, the hallux is opposed or directed backwards and allows for grasping and perching.
Pictures of Swans
Pictures of Swans
Anisodactyly
Anisodactyly is the most common arrangement of digits in birds, with three toes forward and one back. This is common in songbirds and other perching birds, as well as hunting birds like eagles, hawks, and falcons.
pictures of swans
pictures of swans
Ludwig II "The Swan King"
Ludwig II (Ludwig Friedrich Wilhelm; sometimes rendered as Louis II in English) (25 August 1845 – 13 June 1886) was king of Bavaria from 1864 until shortly before his death. He is sometimes referred to as the Swan King in English and der Märchenkönig (the Fairy tale King) in German.
Ludwig is sometimes also referred to as Mad King Ludwig, though the accuracy of that label has been disputed. Because Ludwig was deposed on grounds of mental illness without any medical examination, and died a day later under mysterious circumstances, questions about the medical diagnosis remain controversial.http://picturesofswans.blogspot.com/
Ludwig used his personal fortune to fund the construction of a series of elaborate castles. In 1861 he visited Viollet-le-Duc's work at Pierrefonds, in France, which largely influenced the style of their construction. These projects provided many laborers employment and brought a considerable flow of money to the regions where his castles were built.
In 1868, Ludwig commissioned the first drawings for two of his buildings. The first was Schloss Neuschwanstein, or "New Swanstone Castle", a dramatic Romanesque fortress with soaring fairy tale towers. The second was Herrenchiemsee, a replica of the central section of the palace at Versailles, France, Herrenchiemsee which was to be sited on the Herren Island in the middle of the Chiemsee Lake, was meant to outdo its predecessor in scale and opulence.
The following year, he finished the construction of the royal apartment in the Residenz Palace in Munich, which was followed three years later by the addition of an opulent conservatory or Winter Garden on the palace roof. It featured an ornamental lake with gardens and painted frescoes, and was roofed over using a technically advanced metal and glass construction.
In 1869, Ludwig oversaw the laying of the cornerstone for Schloss Neuschwanstein on a breathtaking mountaintop site overlooking his childhood home, the castle his father had built at Hohenschwangau. The walls of Neuschwanstein are decorated with frescoes depicting scenes from many of Wagner's operas, including the somewhat less than mystic Meistersinger.
In 1872, he began construction for a special festival theater dedicated to the works of Richard Wagner, in the town of Bayreuth. A few years later, he watched early versions of Wagner’s Ring Cycle operas there, though he avoided the public performances. In 1878, construction was completed on Ludwig’s Schloss Linderhof, an ornate palace in neo-French Rococo style, with handsome formal gardens. The grounds contained a Venus grotto lit by electricity, where opera singers performed while Ludwig was rowed in a boat shaped like a shell. In the grounds a romantic woodsman's hut was also built around an artificial tree. The hut, referred to as Hundings Hut, is a reference to a similar structure in der Ring des Niebelungen. There is a sword embedded in the tree. In Walküre, Siegfried's father Siegmund, pulls the sword from the tree. Inside the palace, iconography reflected Ludwig's fascination with the absolutist government of Ancien Régime France. Ludwig saw himself as the "Moon King", a romantic shadow of the earlier "Sun King", Louis XIV of France. From Linderhof, Ludwig enjoyed moonlit sleigh rides in an elaborate eighteenth century sleigh, complete with footmen in eighteenth century livery. Also in 1878, construction began on his Versailles-derived Herrenchiemsee.
In 1879 he travelled to Britain and visited Sir Richard Wallace, to whom he had written for advice on Britain's medieval architecture. Wallace advised Ludwig to take a tour of the countryside in order to survey a variety of ecclesiastical buildings, that he might draw inspiration from them for future building projects. In a letter to Wallace, Ludwig expressed particular admiration for the buildings of Hertfordshire, which he toured extensively.
In the 1880s, Ludwig’s plans proceeded undimmed. He planned construction of a new castle on the Falkenstein near Pfronten in the Allgäu (based on the the tower of St Mary's Church, Baldock), a Byzantine palace in the Graswangtal and a Chinese summer palace in Tyrol. By 1885, demolition for the beginning of the Falkenstein project was underway, and the road to the site had been graded.
Neuschwanstein Castle (German: Schloss Neuschwanstein) is a 19th century neo romanticist palace on a rugged hill above the village of Hohenschwangau near Füssen in southwest Bavaria, Germany. The palace was commissioned by Ludwig II of Bavaria as a retreat and as an homage to Richard Wagner.
Neuschwanstein embodies both the contemporaneous architectural fashion known as castle romanticism (German: Burgenromantik), and Ludwig II's immoderate enthusiasm for the operas of Richard Wagner.The suite of rooms within the Palas contains the Throne Room, Ludwig's suite, the Singers' Hall, and the Grotto. Throughout, the design pays homage to the German legends of Lohengrin, the Swan Knight. Hohenschwangau, where Ludwig spent much of his youth, had decorations of these sagas. These themes were taken up in the operas of Richard Wagner. Many rooms bear a border depicting the various operas written by Wagner, including a theater permanently featuring the set of one such play. Many of the interior rooms remain undecorated, with only 14 rooms finished before Ludwig's death. With the palace under construction at the King's death, one of the major features of the palace remained unbuilt. A massive keep was planned for the middle of the upper courtyard but was never built, at the decision of the King's family. The foundation for the keep is visible in the upper courtyard.
Neuschwanstein is a global symbol of the era of Romanticism. The palace served as a model for the Sleeping Beauty Castle of Disneyland and became a location for films such as Helmut Käutner's Ludwig II (1955) and Luchino Visconti's Ludwig (1972) as well as Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968).
pictures of swans
Swan Lake
Swan Lake (Russian: Лебединое Озеро, Lebedínoye Ózero) is a ballet, op. 20, by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, composed 1875–1876. The scenario, initially in four acts, by Vladimir Begichev and Vasiliy Geltser was fashioned from Russian folk tales as well as an ancient German legend. It tells the story of Odette, a princess turned into a swan by an evil sorcerer's curse. The choreographer of the original production was Julius Reisinger. The ballet received its premiere on February 20, 1877, at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow as The Lake of the Swans. Although it is presented in many different versions, most ballet companies base their stagings both choreographically and musically on the 1895 revival of Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov, first staged for the Imperial Ballet on January 15, 1895, at the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg, Russia. For this revival, Tchaikovsky's score was revised by the St. Petersburg Imperial Theatre's chief conductor and composer Riccardo Drigo.
http://picturesofswans.blogspot.com/
http://picturesofswans.blogspot.com/
Great page on Ludwig II
This is a page I linked to on the internet on on Ludwig the swan king of Bavaria.
ludwig
It is a very informative page on the king who was obsessed with swans.
Warden of the Swans
The Warden of the Swans is a new office in the Royal Household of the Sovereign of the United Kingdom, created in 1993 when the ancient post of Keeper of the Kings Swans (which dated from the 13th century) was divided into two new posts. The second is the Marker of the Swans.
pictures of swans
pictures of swans
Keeper of the Queen's Swans
Keeper of the Queen's Swans
The Keeper of the King's/Queen's Swans was an ancient office in the Royal Household of the Sovereign of England, later Great Britain and ultimately the United Kingdom.
http://picturesofswans.blogspot.com/
The Keeper of the King's/Queen's Swans was an ancient office in the Royal Household of the Sovereign of England, later Great Britain and ultimately the United Kingdom.
http://picturesofswans.blogspot.com/
beak
The beak, bill or rostrum is an external anatomical structure of birds which is used for eating and for grooming, manipulating objects, killing prey, probing for food, courtship and feeding young. The term also refers to a similar mouthpart in some monotremes, cephalopods, cetaceans, pufferfishes, turtles, Anuran tadpoles and sirens.
Beaks vary significantly in size and shape from species to species. The beak is composed of an upper jaw, called the maxilla, and a lower jaw, called the mandible. The jaw is made of bone, typically hollow or porous to conserve weight for flying. The outside surface of the beak is covered by a thin horny sheath of keratin called the rhamphotheca. Between the hard outer layer and the bone is a vascular layer containing blood vessels and nerve endings. The rhamphotheca can include knob, which is found above the beak of some swans, such as the Mute Swan, and some domesticated Chinese geese.
Maxilla, mandible
The maxilla (plural: maxillae), also known as the mustache bone, is a fusion of two bones along the palatal fissure that form the upper jaw. This is similar to the mandible (lower jaw), which is also a fusion of two halves at the mental symphysis. Sometimes (e.g. in bony fish), the maxilla is sometimes called "upper maxilla", with the mandible being the "lower maxilla". Conversely, in birds the upper jaw is often called "upper mandible".
The beak has two holes called nares (nostrils) which connect to the hollow inner beak and thence to the respiratory system. The nares are usually at the base of the beak, near the dorsal surface. Kiwi are the only birds with nostrils at the end of their beak. In some birds, the nares are in a fleshy, often waxy structure at the base of the beak called the cere (from Latin cera, meaning wax).
On some birds, the tip of the beak is hard, dead tissue used for heavy-duty tasks such as cracking nuts or killing prey. On other birds, such as ducks, the tip of the bill is sensitive and contains nerves, for locating things by touch. The beak is worn down by use, so it grows continually throughout the bird's life.
As noted by Darwin in his observations on Galapagos Finches, birds' beaks have evolved to suit the ecological niche they fill: Raptors have decurved (downward curving) beaks for ripping up meat. Hummingbirds have long thin beaks for reaching nectar. The spoonbills' beaks allow them to filter-feed in shallow water. Unlike jaws with teeth, beaks are not used for chewing. Birds swallow their food whole, and it is broken up in the gizzard.
http://picturesofswans.blogspot.com/
Beaks vary significantly in size and shape from species to species. The beak is composed of an upper jaw, called the maxilla, and a lower jaw, called the mandible. The jaw is made of bone, typically hollow or porous to conserve weight for flying. The outside surface of the beak is covered by a thin horny sheath of keratin called the rhamphotheca. Between the hard outer layer and the bone is a vascular layer containing blood vessels and nerve endings. The rhamphotheca can include knob, which is found above the beak of some swans, such as the Mute Swan, and some domesticated Chinese geese.
Maxilla, mandible
The maxilla (plural: maxillae), also known as the mustache bone, is a fusion of two bones along the palatal fissure that form the upper jaw. This is similar to the mandible (lower jaw), which is also a fusion of two halves at the mental symphysis. Sometimes (e.g. in bony fish), the maxilla is sometimes called "upper maxilla", with the mandible being the "lower maxilla". Conversely, in birds the upper jaw is often called "upper mandible".
The beak has two holes called nares (nostrils) which connect to the hollow inner beak and thence to the respiratory system. The nares are usually at the base of the beak, near the dorsal surface. Kiwi are the only birds with nostrils at the end of their beak. In some birds, the nares are in a fleshy, often waxy structure at the base of the beak called the cere (from Latin cera, meaning wax).
On some birds, the tip of the beak is hard, dead tissue used for heavy-duty tasks such as cracking nuts or killing prey. On other birds, such as ducks, the tip of the bill is sensitive and contains nerves, for locating things by touch. The beak is worn down by use, so it grows continually throughout the bird's life.
As noted by Darwin in his observations on Galapagos Finches, birds' beaks have evolved to suit the ecological niche they fill: Raptors have decurved (downward curving) beaks for ripping up meat. Hummingbirds have long thin beaks for reaching nectar. The spoonbills' beaks allow them to filter-feed in shallow water. Unlike jaws with teeth, beaks are not used for chewing. Birds swallow their food whole, and it is broken up in the gizzard.
http://picturesofswans.blogspot.com/
Thursday 8 April 2010
Tuesday 6 April 2010
Monday 5 April 2010
Saturday 3 April 2010
Vouchers for newspapers
With newspaper circulation declining maybe the government coul;d give people vouchers for newspapers.
http://picturesofswans.blogspot.com/
http://picturesofswans.blogspot.com/
My dream about swans and sheep
My Swan dream I had a dream about a dream about a large swan about 2 to 3 times the size of an ordinary swan that was the colour of a muscovy duck. Then I saw a field of sheep which stood on their hind legs and started running in lines at eachother in the field. Like some millitary ritual where lines of them ran at eachother in lines from one side of the field to the other. Bringing up dust then some other animal joined in this march.
I thought to myself this is amazing. I pulled my camera out thinking these pictures will be gold dust.
I started taking pictures.
Then the giant Muscovy duck colored swans seemed to appear again, or something that surprised me.
And I woke up.
Pictures of Swans
I thought to myself this is amazing. I pulled my camera out thinking these pictures will be gold dust.
I started taking pictures.
Then the giant Muscovy duck colored swans seemed to appear again, or something that surprised me.
And I woke up.
Pictures of Swans
Friday 2 April 2010
Anatidae
Anatidae is the biological family that includes ducks, geese and swans. The family has a cosmopolitan distribution, occurring on all the world's continents except Antarctica and on most of the world's islands and island groups. These are birds that are adapted through evolution for swimming, floating on the water surface, and in some cases diving in at least shallow water. (The Magpie Goose is no longer considered to be part of the Anatidae, but is placed in its own family Anseranatidae.) The family contains around 146 species in 40 genera. They are generally herbivorous, and are monogamous breeders. A number of species undertake annual migrations. A few species have been domesticated for agriculture, and many others are hunted for food and recreation. Five species have become extinct since 1600, and many more are threatened with extinction.
pictures of swans
pictures of swans
KPCOFGS
KPCOFGS
Latin English
regio domain
regnum kingdom
phylum divisio phylum1 division2
classis class
ordo order
familia family
genus genus
species species
pictures of swans
King Phillip Crossed Over France Going South
Main taxonomic ranksLatin English
regio domain
regnum kingdom
phylum divisio phylum1 division2
classis class
ordo order
familia family
genus genus
species species
pictures of swans
taxonomic ranks
Main taxonomic ranks
Latin English
regio domain
regnum kingdom
phylum divisio phylum1 division2
classis class
ordo order
familia family
genus genus
species species
Pictures of Swans
Latin English
regio domain
regnum kingdom
phylum divisio phylum1 division2
classis class
ordo order
familia family
genus genus
species species
Pictures of Swans
Coscoroba Swan
The Coscoroba Swan, Coscoroba coscoroba, is the smallest species of swan. However, it is still a fairly large species of waterfowl, averaging 4.2 kg (9.3 lbs), 1 m (3.3 ft) long and 1.57 m (5.2 ft) across the wings. Like all other swans it belongs to the family Anatidae. Since it is only distantly related to the other swans, the Coscoroba Swan is placed in the monotypic genus Coscoroba.
The Coscoroba Swan has white plumage except for black tips to the outer six primary feathers, although this black is often barely visible on the closed wing. In flight, the black wing tips are conspicuous.
The Coscoroba Swan breeds in South America from southern Chile and central Argentina south to Tierra del Fuego and the Falkland Islands. In winter it flies north to central Chile, northern Argentina, Uruguay and the south east tip of Brazil.
Coscoroba Swans preening
http://picturesofswans.blogspot.com/
The Coscoroba Swan has white plumage except for black tips to the outer six primary feathers, although this black is often barely visible on the closed wing. In flight, the black wing tips are conspicuous.
The Coscoroba Swan breeds in South America from southern Chile and central Argentina south to Tierra del Fuego and the Falkland Islands. In winter it flies north to central Chile, northern Argentina, Uruguay and the south east tip of Brazil.
Coscoroba Swans preening
http://picturesofswans.blogspot.com/
Thursday 1 April 2010
Mute swans regions
The Mute Swan is found naturally mainly in temperate areas of Europe across western Asia, as far east as the Russian maritimes, near Sidemi. Gmelin (1789) and John Latham (1824)[10] reported Mute Swans present in Kamchatka in the 1700s.
It is partially migratory throughout northern latitudes in Europe and Asia, as far south as north Africa and the Mediterranean. It is known and recorded to have nested in Iceland and is a vagrant to that area, as well as to Bermuda..
mute swan pictures
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